- By Dr Chuck DeGroat

Lent invites us to join Christ on the way of the Cross. It’s an intentional season of reflection and meditation. Even more, we’re challenged to arrange our lives in such a way as to be daily frustrated. Let me explain.

As people addicted to comfort and convenience, we’re often unaware of how we live to feel good about ourselves, to gain a bit of affirmation, to exert influence, to maximize our own pleasure, to satisfy our immediate needs. Lent invites us to intentionally frustrate ourselves, to engage in a season of deprivation, which actually makes us more aware of the depth of our dependence on any number of things – a substance, our reputation, control, achievement, being right, being comfortable, being secure.

Lent is NOT a behaviour modification program. It’s not about going off chocolate or caffeine or alcohol. It’s about frustrating what Thomas Merton calls our “false self,” our illusory self, the part of us addicted to living the lie, a life of hiding. As Merton writes, “All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honour, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real.”

In this sense, Lent’s frustrating reality is an invitation to, once and for all, taste reality, our truest self, gifted to us by God as a pure act of grace. Beneath our illusory self is our real identity, who we were made to be. It is our true self, secure, beloved, held in the Father’s embrace. Lent strips us of everything that is not us. In that sense, Lent is not a chore. It is an opportunity for profound grace by a God who longs to love us at our core, not in our false projected self which desire influence and accolades, but in our truest, most humble and dependent self, once lost but now found in the wilderness of Lent.

Each of the resources below offers a trustworthy Lenten guide to this unique encounter. But no book can manufacture grace. It is most fundamentally about your willingness to surrender to the God who wants to invade your heart with disruptive love, who wants to stifle your exhausting attempts to manufacture love with unfathomable grace. Lent affords you this unique opportunity, by God’s grace. The way down is the way up. Through this Lenten journey, you might find yourself hidden in Christ, and revealed ultimately in the Easter reality of God’s resurrection life, stripped of pretension and falsehood, and revealed as a humble and dependent son or daughter. That’s my hope and prayer, and perhaps yours as well.

Resources

2012 Lenten Daily Readings

Richard Rohr, Wondrous Encounters

Henri Nouwen, Show Me the Way

Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter (Readings from C.S. Lewis, Nouwen, Buechner, Chesterton, and more…)

Lent from St Francis and St Clare of Assisi

The Meaning of Lent

Here is a little Valentine inspiration from Ann Voskamp… Happy Valentines!

Marital love is a demanding and dying thing compared to the stuff of movies and mirages.

The love of imagination — it’s a different beast entirely than love made in the image of a Saviour with nails in His hands.

There are no standing lovers: the only way to love is to lay down.

Lay down plans. Lay down agendas. Lay down self.

Love is always the laying down.

This is how to make love out of a marriage: Love lays down it’s own wants to lift up the will of another.

Love let’s go of it’s plans — to hold on to a person.

Falling in love again isn’t so much about communicating better, but about connecting deeper.

Poor communication doesn’t disconnect souls — it’s the disconnected souls who poorly communicate. When we’re well attached, we communicate well and when we aren’t fully communicating it’s because we don’t feel connected.

No matter our age, it never stops, this need to feel securely attached, and messy marriages can be because of attachment disorders. That’s what good relationships are: safe havens in the world, this base that makes us brave to venture out into the world — and safe to come home.

That’s what He made love to be: for love to bear all things. “Bears,” it’s stego in the Greek — “a thatch roof.”

Love bears all things — love literally becomes a thatch roof.

That’s what real love always is: I become a roof for you, a wing for you, a shelter in your storm.

Come to me. Count on me to hold you.

5 Ways to Fight through to Love:

1. You don’t need honed communication skills —

As much as the will to connect hearts.

2. Get to the tender wounded question behind  every fight:

“Can I depend on you? Do my feelings matter to you? How do you care about me? Hold me?”

3.  In the anxiety that’s masking as anger, don’t up the ante

Don’t up the ante with name-calling, labels or threats of the D word (divorce).

Critical language can register in the brain as the same area as physical pain — which leaves your spouse dealing with their own pain, instead of caring for you in yours.

4. Be your spouse’s ER:

Emotionally Respond. Listen to the cries of fear behind the fighting. Hear anger as a cry for attachment, this call for connection. Have the courage in the midst of the heat to tenderly reach out and touch the bruised places. Reassure that you’ll always be there, that you care, that you’re in this together.

5. Hold each other close and long…

Love bears all things. Be a roof, a wing, a shelter in the storm.

“It is not your love that sustains the marriage —

but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”

~ Deitrich Bonhoeffer

Scot Mcknight says ” the soterian gospel resolves one problem — our broken relationship with God. The soterian gospel focuses on one event — the cross as the place where Christ takes our place, shoulders our sins, removes our guilt, and forgives our sin. The soterian gospel pleads for one major response — trust in that Christ for that problem.” (See King Jesus Gospel)

The Story gospel is otherwise urges us to see the gospel in Story terms. The gospel is that the Story of Israel comes to its definitive completeness in the Story of Jesus. In this video you will be introduced to the holistic nature of the gospel and challenged to return to the Bible to get a better picture of the story and how it should shape your whole life. I love this!

The word missional has become a buzzword that so many are using but not living. It must be defined. To help my readers understand what I mean when I use the word missional here is a conversation with Glenn Smith about defining missional church: (Glenn Smith is a world-renowned theologian and missiologist who has been leading “Christian Direction” in Montreal for a couple of decades. Glen is a huge influence in my life and ministry and is becoming a dear friend)

Have you been following this discussion about the missional church? Perhaps you have asked yourself

• Is this just another fad?
• What is this word, missional?
• Does it mean anything for me, for my church?

Let me try to unpack what it means…
When we talk about a novel, we refer to it as “fictional literature”. The noun, “fiction” becomes the adjective, “fictional”. It is same thing with the wonderful word “mission”. When it is used as an adjective, we say “missional”, for a church that is dedicated to mission. But I call it an accordion word – the more air you pump into it, the more noise it makes! At the core, in spite of all the noise, there are four key ideas:

1. First, we are affirming that God is missionary in His character – His Being in Action. Mission is first and foremost God acting through Jesus in His creation by the work of His Spirit. Yes, God is love, just, holy…and He is also missionary!
2. When we use the word missional, we are reaffirming the Gospel . Jesus is LORD. A king has a kingdom; the Good News is about the LORDSHIP of Jesus over all His creation, in our lives, in His Church and over our cities.
3. When we use the word missional, we are admitting that we live in a new period in our history. Some people call this, “Post-Christendom”, a period where Christianity and the Church are no longer at the centre of our culture. We may grieve, but we also need to think and act in fresh ways.
4. When we use the word missional, we are affirming that the Church, by its very nature, is living out the implications of the Gospel; we are a people sent into our neighbourhoods and cities.

Read the rest of the article by Glenn Smith

One of our core rhythms at The Journey is EAT. We tell people that to be a part of this community your discretional spending should go down and your food budget should go up. We encourage people to have 3 meals a week with others… opening their home and their lives.

Tim Chester: “Jesus didn’t run projects, establish ministries, create programs, or put on events. He ate meals. If you routinely share meals and you have a passion for Jesus, then you’ll be doing mission. It’s not that meals save people. People are saved through the gospel message. But meals will create natural opportunities to share that message in a context that resonates powerfully with what you’re saying.”

Francis A. Schaeffer was born 100 years ago today (Jan. 30, 1912). He died in 1984. In 1974 he wrote this in his book No Little People:

As I see it, the Christian life must be comprised of three concentric circles, each of which must be kept in its proper place.

In the outer circle must be the correct theological position, true biblical orthodoxy and the purity of the visible church. This is first, but if that is all there is, it is just one more seedbed for spiritual pride.

In the second circle must be good intellectual training and comprehension of our own generation. But having only this leads to intellectualism and again provides a seedbed for pride.

In the inner circle must be the humble heart — the love of God, the devotional attitude toward God. There must be the daily practice of the reality of the God whom we know is there.

These three circles must be properly established, emphasized and related to each other. At the center must be kept a living relationship to the God we know exists. When each of these three circles is established in its proper place, there will be tongues of fire and the power of the Holy Spirit. Then, at the end of my life, when I look back over my work since I have been a Christian, I will see that I have not wasted my life.

Article by Jonathan Dodson

The popularity of missional community is rising among evangelicals, and yet, the American church is nowhere near a missional tipping point. I’ve faced missional highs and missional lows. Along the way, I’ve considered a number of things that are absolutely necessary for us to endure the transition to missional church. How should we respond to the challenges of missional community? Here are three things to keep in mind as you lead in God’s mission (and thanks for doing so).

1. Building Missional Community Requires Stretched Grace. We need more than a drop of grace to get us going on God’s mission. We need an ocean of grace to swim in to continue on God’s mission together. Do you remember when you knew nothing about “missional church”? That’s where many people are. Do you recall how long it took you to process, assimilate, and live out the principles of missional community? This probably took a couple of years, and if you’re a leader, you are in it “full time”. When leading others in missional community, remember the slowness in your own story and extend others the same grace and patience King Jesus extended you. After all, the kingdom of God is slow, and thank God for that! We need more than a drop of grace to get us going on God’s mission. We need grace stretched across the length of our lives and depth of our missional failures and successes. Jesus secured this grace, so revel in it and splash it on others.

Leader Tip: Try to avoid making mission a new benchmark of religious performance. Instead, motivate people with grace. Grace preached and grace embodied. Embody the grace of Christ, who has put up with our missional fumblings for centuries, as you lead others on mission. When it comes to mission, it’s not perfection overnight but progress over a lifetime.

2. Community is What You Make of It. In order to make progress with your community, remind them that community is what you make it. Community isn’t an idea; its real people, awkward, struggling, weird, different, funny, slow, arrogant, sheepish, humble, curious, skeptical, excitable. You get the idea. Jesus didn’t die to make cliques; he died and rose to form diverse communities. Diverse and different is hard. It requires love, effort, and patience. Community doesn’t just magically appear in a church. In fact, churches don’t have community at all; they are community. The question is, “What will you make of the community?” I’m falling in love with real community, which is really messy, with people who are so different from me and yet so alike in Jesus. There’s nothing like pursuing difficult people, being loved by different people, serving alongside a diverse people. What a display of grace (nothing else could hold us together). 

Leader Tip: In a highly consumeristic, individual-centered society, it will take at least a generation to get back to the biblical notion of community. And even then, we will need more than community to sustain community. Let’s all agree to shatter our ideal of community and enter the real community of people God has placed in our lives. Let’s lift Christ higher than the community. Jesus is head not the body. He’s lord of the church. He’s the hope of the community, not the community itself. Community needs a center deeper than connection and a purpose greater than comfort. It needs the Lord of Community, Jesus Christ, to knit unlikely people together as a display of our common need for grace. Insist on this.

3. Labor for the Lord of Mission not the Fruit of Mission. With all the missional hype, our faith can easily slip from trusting in the Lord of the Harvest to trusting in the fruit of our labors. I’ve had several deep relationships with non-Christians dissolve over the past year and a half. This came after spending a lot of time with them over meals, out for philosophy discussions, in our home for counseling, and with our family doing fun stuff. They were loved and heard the gospel in ways that were profoundly relevant to their own fears, struggles, and hopes…and they walked away. They walked away from Jesus and created distance from us. That’s hard. If I’m putting faith in the fruit of my missional labors (at least at what I can see), then I’m discouraged. But if I’m putting faith in the Lord of the Harvest, I can be confident that he has been lifted up and that he is in charge of all salvation. He has endured much more to witness friends walk away from his costly sacrifice. He’s not only a model of missional endurance; he’s the hope for missional endurance.

Leader Tip: Put your faith in the Lord of Mission not the fruit of mission. It can be easy to congratuate ourselves when mission is high and berate ourselves when mission is low. That’s a sign that we’ve misplaced our faith. We put it in ourselves or our “fruitfulness.” Come back to the gospel every single day and ask the Spirit to put Jesus highest among your affections and greatest among your hopes. Keep repenting and putting your faith in Jesus and he will take care of the mission.

1. An Empire Built on Love – Donald Miller – This is especially timely with all the Christianity is masculine conversation that is around the blogging world.

2. Evangelical Reject – Kurt Willems - Kurt I love you! If I lived in the United States I too would be an Evangelical Outsider, but in Canada these views are much more normal or at least accepted… at least that is my experience.

3. How I turned Movement into Mega: The Story of Sheffield – Mike Breen – I can’t hear this too much, this story has inspired what we have become at The Journey.

4. Good for the nuns!

5. If you are not reading Ann Voskamp start today!: Here is a little taste of her amazing prose… “There’s a whole lifetime of memories here at the lake and how many Sunday picnics of fried chicken have we had right up there at the lighthouse? She’d serve extra helpings of green coleslaw and I’d pump the swing high and I could see how we might, soar straight out over the lake. There’s a time when you think nothing will end. I lean into her and she leans into me, and we’re warmer like this, close. Doesn’t there have to be more than a decade left of this? And there doesn’t have to be anything. The waves keep breaking. Couldn’t she stay until she’s 117? When you wake to losing someone, you win love. When you realize that what you have, you will lose —  you win real eyes. You win grateful joy. It comes across the water and I turn to face it directly: It’s only when you realize everyone you love will one day leave you— that you really begin to love. I reach over for Mama’s hand and she does that, she squeezes mine softly and that says more… most. Someday, it is possible, I could stand here on my own 61st. I can close my eyes and almost see that.“

6. Byron Borger of Hearts and Minds gives his list of the best Christian books of 2011. Well worth your time.

7. Ten mistakes leaders should avoid at all costs - Michael Hyatt

8. The Missional Renaissance. Pastors: this is a good interview of Reggie McNeal worth your time.

Family is this altar you lie down on and build joy. – Ann Voskamp

A couple of years ago I found myself outside on a very cold December night flooding an outdoor rink. I grew up on a farm, where I could come home after school and head down to the pond after school for a game of shinny. I recall on those cold winter days my dad cleaning off the ice so we could play hockey.

I have a son who loves hockey and a family who loves to skate… somehow they convinced me that this rink was good idea, so there I was late into the night spraying water on snow in the backyard thinking is this worth it?  I worked late into the night, and many other nights on that rink. Eventually, we finished flooding… After the first skate Kellan comes into the house, rosy cheeks and all and says “Thanks, Dad.” He just did it. I didn’t ask him to thank me… it just came right from his heart.

There are moments in life that that you wish you could preserve forever, that you wish you could somehow bottle them and return to them whenever you want to.

For all us Dads and Moms creating memories for our kids, Geoff Dresser nails it. The cold nights. The wet boots. The frozen fingers. The ‘thank you’s’.

All that life in their cheeks, all that effort, all that love, it flames with a heat of it’s own.

I sit in the window and I watch how they skate… laughing, playing, enjoying the beauty of the moment… thinking it is all worth it.

Living in an under-resourced, inner-city neighborhood I had become accustomed to the constant knocks on the front door. But this was different. As I opened the door I was taken aback at the large group of youth and adults, all swarming around my front door like a pile of hungry ants – all with perfectly matching shirts that had the logo of their church emblazoned on the front and back along with the phrase “Outreach Ministry” in big, bold letters. It was at once a scene that was one part intimidating, one part awkward, and one part funny.

One brave soul in the group who had been convinced of the worthiness of their missional efforts piped up with a semi-rehearsed speech:

“Can we mow your yard? We’re just here to love on you people.”

“You people?” I thought to myself. I’d been called a lot of things in the past. “You people” was not one of them. That was a first.

And it was also the first time that I had ever felt the sting of losing a little bit of my dignity. The first time, as a person of resource, I had ever been on the receiving end of a missional project dripping with good intentions, but bad implementation.

You see, to them I was not “Stew” (as all my friends call me) – I was a nameless project – something to be accomplished. Me and my yard were a benevolent deed in a long list of good deeds to be accomplished that day under the impatient heat of the summer sun. The question seemed harmless enough, but even a sharp knife that comes wrapped in good intentions hurts nonetheless.

Now contrast that picture with this one: A 4-alarm fire ravages an apartment building in ourneighborhood. A single mom with 2 young children is displaced, along with 45 other families, from her home. A friend in our Missional Community at the time lives a block away from the fire, shows up on the scene as the 6 fire trucks are dousing the flames, and feels led by the Holy Spirit to talk to this single mom. He connects her with us and she ends up moving in with us.

5 kids under the age of 6 are now packed into our little house, and in the middle of the chaos, transition, pain, struggle and tears, our little community of believers surrounds this mom and her children with support, affection, listening ears, and everything in between.

The love, sacrifice, and difficulty was not glamorous – it was not sexy – it was not easy – it took time…lots of time – and this family was certainly not a project to be completed, a task to be accomplished. This family had become our family and our family had become their family. It was the weaving together of both families.

Like a fabric, this was a network of relationships weaving their lives, sweat, time, energy, prayers, and tears together. This was incarnational ministry in its essence:

living among
learning from
working with
being shaped by
and walking alongside.

What excites me about the current missional conversation is that it seems to be catalyzing a resurgence for activism. That is a good thing.

“Let’s go!”
“Let’s do something!”
“Let’s be active!”

But the first story is what happens when “missional” is not joined with “incarnational.” Missional is the “what” but incarnational is the “how.” They are inseparable, as they were with Jesus. Jesus was sent by God on a mission, but “how” he was sent was just as important as “that” he was sent. “Missional” without “incarnational” devolves into mere projects. “Missional” without “incarnational” at best will be a passing fad, a short-lived experiment that has no staying power, or a kind of paint that we plaster on our current methodologies until some new, shiny paint comes along to replace it.

But I have a greater hope because of the incarnation of Jesus. Because He accomplished his mission, because he came to live for us, suffer for us, die for us, and be raised for us, now we are freed, because of His work and performance, to purse the long-term, difficult, self-denying incarnational mission to love others for the sake of the gospel.

Dreamer, catalyst, avid indoorsman… Michael Stewart (who goes by “Stew”) is Founder and Director of the Verge Conference and Verge Network, a network created as an advocate and champion for movements of gospel-centered missional communities. He is also Pastor of Missional Communities atAustin Stone Community Church. He has lived in at-risk, inner city neighborhoods in Memphis and Austin where he has, with his family, lived out his passion for holistic community development, advocacy for the poor, and gospel-centered justice. His passion is to see ordinary people radically transformed by the gospel of grace and engaged in the mission of God.